Monday, June 15, 2015

Happy Housiversary!

It's been a good year for the roses.

Six years ago today, I was given the keys to chez Aurora. Scott and I met here, me carrying a bottle of cheap sparkling and a bag of
Doritos down the hill on my bicycle. The plan was to have a quick toast at the
house and then go do something else—have dinner very likely. Instead, I started
ripping up carpet while Scott took a six-in-one tool to the windows to
get them to open. Possibly it all started when I magically got the sconces over
the mantel to work. I don’t know. It’s a blur, frankly.

Scott paints while I pick roses pictured above.

Since then we celebrate our housiversary
by doing some sort of house project. This is the first year that June 15th has fallen on a Monday and so the first year that we’ve had three
days to give over to “celebrating.” It’s little short of miraculous that either
of us are able to move as of Monday evening. What with Gradka still wearing her
cone and being subjected to daily doses of antibiotic (three to go!), and having the floors refinished last
week, it’s been a particularly odd and disjointed housiversary. We wisely
decided against the major reworking of the front lawn but I’m not sure that the
substitute activities have been that
much less strain on our aging bodies.

The floors being so
gorgeous, of course we decided it was about time to add quarter round to the
baseboards in the living room.Which
meant some quality time at Alki Lumber (where we learned that what I'm continuing to call "quarter round" is actually something else entirely) and some time with miter box for Scott
and a paintbrush for me. We look at the installed quarter round in situ and marvel at how much it
seems it has always been there.

Still Life with Hammer and Radio

Quarter round in
place, there was nothing, other than our aching bones, to stop us from shifting
the furniture back into place. In truth, that may have been stretched over a
couple of days. And there are still a few boxes of stuff to shift back into place.

The living room and its gorgeous new-again floor

Agapostemon texanus on wild arugula blossom

Yesterday, I think, Scott painted the
Tomato Trough while I put “Ship and Shore” on the Adirondack chairs and the like.
I hate working with anything that I’m warned may burst into spontaneous flame,
and now I’ve got a used paintbrush that scares me.

Today, the Anniversary Itself, we somehow took our own sweet time about starting any housiversary projects. After a leisurely breakfast I sat down to see if I could identify the bee I'd watched on the wild arugula while Scott was doing something worky--putting that first coat of paint on the quarter round, I do believe. Happily, in this magical age of the internets, there's no need to remain ignorant and I'm happy to report that my metallic green bee was likely an Agapostemon texanus. Darned handsome and very industrious anyway.

Scott started in on
remodeling the patio door which was a Housiversary Project of a few years ago.
This inside door, purchased on West Seattle Yard Sale Day, has not been weathering so well outdoors, and he had a clever
scheme for revising the door to match, somewhat, the fence that was possibly
last year’s housiversary event. While he popped out a panel and sawed new
pieces of wood to fit, I devoted myself to the least glamorous housiversary activity to
date: scrubbing the kitchen floor. That floor was the cleanest surface in the house when we moved in but it’s always been more than
a bit grubby. I’d assumed that it was just the case that forty-odd years of
kitchen grease and the like couldn’t be removed but, after only six years of living with it,
today I decided to see what some Bon Ami might do. Huh. It seems we’ve been
condemning ourselves to living with waxy yellow build-up all this time.

The now-shiny floor in front of the oven

Don’t I
feel like a 1960s housewife? The floor is much brighter. I’m not sure if I’m
entirely convinced that’s an improvement.

Always a sucker for a bit of reflection

Floor finished (one cat dish broken, one partial concussion
after smashing my head into a corner shelf), I changed into my painting clothes
to put a first coat of paint on the new section of the patio door. And then,
thank goodness, we declared it was time for the traditional housiversary meal
of sparkling and Doritos. We love you, house!